Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry David Thoreau

Prejudice, Thoreau implies, is less a moral stain than a habit of mind - and habits can be broken. The sting of "never too late" is that it denies the favorite excuse of the prejudiced: that bias is simply "how I was raised", fused to identity, sealed by age. Thoreau makes prejudice sound like a voluntary attachment we keep choosing, day after day, out of laziness, comfort, or the small pleasures of superiority.

The intent is quietly radical. He isn't offering a feel-good slogan about personal growth; he's issuing a challenge to the grown adult who thinks their opinions have hardened into fact. "Give up" is doing heavy lifting here: it frames prejudice as a possession, something you clutch because it serves you. It also suggests withdrawal symptoms. Letting go means surrendering a story in which your instincts are always right and your group is always the default.

Context matters. Writing in a pre-Civil War America thick with slavery, nativism, and pious conformity, Thoreau was allergic to the way society disguises cruelty as custom. His broader project - from civil disobedience to his distrust of majority rule - treats moral clarity as a personal discipline, not a social mood. The line courts self-reproach: if it's never too late, then delay is choice, not fate.

There's also a sly, democratic optimism beneath the severity. Thoreau refuses to exile anyone as irredeemable; he insists the door to revision stays unlocked. That generosity is strategic: it keeps the burden where it belongs, on the person doing the judging.